The weather station base unit is linked to my PC via a serial cable. Data is transferred to the PC every 8 seconds. 3 programs are provided with the weather station to display,manipulate and publish the recorded data.Information is retrieved and displayed using Heavy Weather Version 2.0. Graphs are created with Heavy Weather Review V1.0 and finally data can be published to the web using Heavy Weather Publisher V1.0.

Heavy weather is the main application that interfaces with the weather station. It can be used to change settings and set alarms within the base unit, which is generally easier than doing so using the buttons on the front of the weather station. It displays 'live' readings sent from the weather station.

Some configuration settings for the base unit can be set from within Heavy Weather. The primary setting is the recording interval between the 175 data sets stored in the base unit. In my setup this is set to 10 minutes between readings. The data is stored in a history file on my hard disk. This file is in a proprietry format but I can export the data to a text file so that it can be manipulated with other software. I do this to generate the wind direction bar chart and percentage direction pie chart shown in the monthly weather charts. There is no limit to the number of data sets that can be stored in this file. With my recording interval set to 10 minutes there would be 52,560 data sets per year.

The displayed units can be set or changed at any time and the history file is updated accordingly for all data sets.

Heavy Weather Review interfaces directly with the history file created by Heavy Weather. It uses the data to generate simple graphs. Although there is only one graphing style the data can be formatted in many ways to create graphs for 1 week, 1 month or between selected dates. You can also display data from 2 sets, for example temperature and humidity, along the same timeline.

Over the last few months I have gradually stopped using Heavy Weather Review and moved over to using Microsoft Excel to create my graphs. This is partly because the problems I have been having with recording data has resulted in some months being split between more than 1 history file and there is no way of joining them back together into one graph, and partly because Excel allows me to be more creative in the way the final data is displayed.

Publisher is used to firstly create the format for the image. Pictures can be imported and the data rearranged to get the look you want. You can create more than one format but only one can be active at any one time. The resulting table is uploaded as a jpeg file at a pre-determined export interval using the built in ftp client.

From September 2007 I have added an observation line to the bottom. This shows the current weather observation, which can be quite different to the tendency picture which is simply driven by the speed of change of the pressure reading, which often shows as sunny when, in fact, it's raining. The observations are updated manually, as and when I happen to be near the computer and look out of the window. If conditions change rapidly , as they often do up here, the observation may not match the view from the webcam, or the tendency picture. In fact, all 3 could be different.

I had been looking for a good 'simple' webcam driver driver with built in ftp for some time. Most of the software available is far to sophisticated for my application but eventually I found Dorgem which does just what I need and no more. It's freeware as well.It can be setup to capture still images at a pre determined time interval and then upload the saved image to a website with an added date & time stamp.